Dilettante philosophers, gather round! The Yachtsman has a poorly thought out point to make!

The Yachtsman

It's 4:13 AM, and I'm not proud of the ramblings you are about to receive.

I never really listened to Floyd lyrically until yesterday. Weird? Yes. I've been listening to them since birth (no for real "The Wall" was on heavy rotation in the cassette deck of our Chevy Blazer back in the day). But I never really LISTENED TO THEM.

- explanation: I'm an ADD guy (like the real kind, not the "I can't get my work done so I need Adderrall" kind...like I can't get a single thing done in life if I'm not juiced up on some sort of brain stimulant from Pfizer) - so my brain works differently than most other people. Melodic complexity and tone intervals and the sort actually soothe the constant ping pong running of my brain, so much so that I'll actually drown out whatever the hell the lyrics are in favor of focusing on the guitar riffs or the synthesizer. It makes sense if you have an addled ADD brain like mine. -

DIGRESSION. So when I heard these lyrics yesterday for seemingly the first time (as in focusing on them for the first time...god knows I've belted these out while driving/drinking/karaokeing to myself a thousand times), my heart broke in a million pieces:

Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull dayYou fritter and waste the hours in an offhand wayKicking around on a piece of ground in your hometownWaiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rainYou are young and life is long, and there is time to kill todayAnd then one day you find, ten years have got behind youNo one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

Now I've spent the past 24 hours going over all my favorite songs by Pink Floyd (I'm 29, that's pathetic, I'm well aware) and revisiting the lyrics. I've come to this question: is my fatalistic outlook on life based in my early obsession with Pink Floyd, and did Roger Waters' lyrics pierce through into my subconscious (and through David Gilmour's wicked guitar-ing) and leave me with this defeatist philosophy? Am I a negative nancy because of Floyd, Scott Norwood, Bethlehem Steel, or a combination of all three? THESE ARE THINGS I NEED TO FIGURE OUT NOW.

But here's the rub. It's not like I'm going to STOP listening to Floyd, or STOP watching the Bills, or STOP lamenting the fact that Buffalo will never be what it once was (or what was promised to us in our youth). I think now I'll just have to view all of these things with a little bit more perspective. As in I can't invest myself so emotionally into it. BUT I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THAT.

How do you guys do it? How do you, the (apparently now) 1,000+ readers of our blog put the losses (year after year after year after year after year) into perspective? I want to be able to be Captain Ivory Tower and not take the losses so fucking seriously. LIKE DONTE WHITNER, THE DESIRE IS THERE.

I mean, I'm not Patton Oswalt in "Big Fan", but these things still affect me to an inordinate degree.

So, as I trudge to New Jersey tomorrow afternoon to watch the mediocre New York Red Bulls play the 1st leg of their playoff cup draw vs. the Galaxy, I will be thinking of ways to not let sports affect me as much as they have for the 29 years I've been on this planet. By the time I hit 30, I would like to be able to view sports in a vacuum.